- How Do Young Adults Engage With Science and Research on Social Media? Some Preliminary Findings and an Agenda for Future Research. Facebook, not Twitter. So I’m doing it all wrong? Any young adults reading this and want to tell me how I’m doing?
- Genetic dissection of grain zinc concentration in spring wheat for mainstreaming biofortification in CIMMYT wheat breeding. Two interesting regions on different chromosomes.
- Harnessing genetic potential of wheat germplasm banks through impact-oriented-prebreeding for future food and nutritional security. Not just Zn.
- Genetic analysis of a major international collection of cultivated apple varieties reveals previously unknown historic heteroploid and inbred relationships. The deep history of the justly famous UK collection.
- Middle-range theories of land system change. Towards a Grand Unified Theory. But do we need one?
- Classifying drivers of global forest loss. Commodities, basically. But what’s the good of that without a theory?
- The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming. Theory shtheory: measure externalities.
- Beyond Calories: A Holistic Assessment of the Global Food System. Micronutrients get lost disproportionately badly along the supply chain. How’s that for a theory?
Brainfood: Campesino maize, DELLA proteins, CC response, Nematodes, Collection duplication, Epidemics
- Evolutionary and food supply implications of ongoing maize domestication by Mexican campesinos. Effective population of 500 million plants potentially feeds 50 million people.
- Modulating plant growth–metabolism coordination for sustainable agriculture. Short AND sweet.
- Cracking the Code of Biodiversity Responses to Past Climate Change. Quite a bit of adaptation, not just migration and extinction.
- Plant-Parasitic Nematodes and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest biotic threat to productivity on the continent, and probably going to get worse.
- Efficient curation of genebanks using next-generation sequencing reveals substantial duplication of germplasm accessions. Out of 1143 accessions of a wild wheat in 3 collections, 564 are unique.
- Emerging plant disease epidemics: Biological research is key but not enough. Not just about the money.
Nibbles: Farm subsidies, Pressing and naming plants, Cowpea primer, California crop maps, Caribbean mangoes, ABS meeting, Banana mapping, Sarada Krishnan, Indian millets, Apple varieties, Early modern bees
- Fun Twitter thread on zombie tropes about farm subsidies in the US. Should have been a blog post, though.
- Kew boffins on how to make an herbarium specimen. More complicated than you might think. And why it’s important. While I’m at it, this is how you use herbarium specimens etc. to name plants.
- IITA genebank manager interviewed about cowpea.
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of cartography. Not very relevant here, I know, but a monumental achievement that I wanted to celebrate. And here’s a wonderful example of cutting-edge online cartography that will no doubt feature in a future edition.
- The banana mapping project is progressing nicely.
- Damn, I missed the St Lucia mango festival. Next year?
- Africa discusses ABS.
- Dr Sarada Krishnan of Denver Botanic Garden profiled. She worked on the global coffee conservation strategy. Among many other things.
- Millets to the rescue in Gujarat.
- Red Delicious bumped from top apple spot.
- Amateurs have spread information about beekeeping since 16th century.
Brainfood: Food as art, Maize seed, Jatropha genome, Wild camelids, Global nutrition, Price shocks, Pearl millet domestication, Yam domestication, NNL, New beer microbe, Dog coat colour, Herbarium biases, Maize N fixation
- Food as a daily art: ideas for its use as a method in development practice. Food can bring traditional and scientific knowledge together in an smorgasbord of ideas.
- Maize seed systems in different agro-ecosystems; what works and what does not work for smallholder farmers. Sure, purchasing hybrids from the formal sector seed system is gaining ground in Malawi, Zambia, and Chiapas, but not for home consumption, and only in high potential areas.
- Genome sequence of Jatropha curcas L., a non‐edible biodiesel plant, provides a resource to improve seed‐related traits. Is Jatropha even still a thing?
- Comparing genetic diversity and demographic history in co-distributed wild South American camelids. Vicuña (alpaca wild relative) display lower genetic diversity within populations than guanaco (llama) but more structure across Peru; strong bottlenecks happened at different times, but in both cases much later than domestication and before Spanish conquest.
- The Global Nutrient Database: availability of macronutrients and micronutrients in 195 countries from 1980 to 2013. Supply of micronutrients has increased during the period globally and across levels of development.
- Effects of Food Prices on Poverty: The Case of Paraguay, a Food Exporter and a Non-Fully Urbanized Country. Food price hikes are, overall, bad for everyone, but least bad for the poorest and richest.
- A western Sahara centre of domestication inferred from pearl millet genomes. Harlan’s non-centre not found. Free-to-read.
- Molecular basis of African yam domestication: analyses of selection point to root development, starch biosynthesis, and photosynthesis related genes. Domestication of wild yams was all about learning to grow in full sunlight, and it involved losing 30% of their diversity. But remember current wild yams are not all that wild.
- No net loss for people and biodiversity. How to ensure that people really are no worse off after an offset intervention.
- Identification of a novel interspecific hybrid yeast from a metagenomic open fermentation sample using Hi-C. Doesn’t work on its own, though.
- Length variations within the Merle retrotransposon of canine PMEL: correlating genotype with phenotype. Mobile DNA gets everywhere.
- Widespread sampling biases in herbaria revealed from large‐scale digitization. Blame mega-collectors.
- Nitrogen fixation in a landrace of maize is supported by a mucilage-associated diazotrophic microbiota. In aerial roots, no less.
Nibbles: Lad spuds, Assisi olives, Amazing maize art, Wild tea, Peruvian alpaca, TR4, Seed banks, Space Seed Force, Embrapa sweetpotato, ITPGRFA
- The hidden treasure of Colombian potatoes. In a lad mag, no less.
- Umbrian olive terraces get UN status, no less.
- Maize furniture, no less.
- New wild tea species found. In protected areas, no less.
- Saving the dreadlocked Suri alpaca of Peru through spinning.
- Saving the banana through lots of things.
- Seed banks for restoration, but also so much more.
- Even in space. No less.
- But don’t forget to safety duplicate .
- Seed Treaty scores important first, explained. I hope.